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VICKI GABEREAU TELEVISION INTERVIEW

As filming for the fifth season of Stargate SG-1 ended, Richard appeared on Vicki Gabereau, a Canadian talk show from Vancouver. Taped on October 10th, his appearance aired on October 12th.

Vicki Gabereau:
Hello, Iím Vicky Gabereau. On the show today, the man who is always on a mission on his show, Stargate SG-1, and for personal causes too. Richard Dean Anderson, worldís cutest guy will be here...

[Turning to Richard who is sitting beside her, off camera, reading the teleprompter.]
Donít tell me any jokes until I get through this bit.

I should tell you that he's just wrapped up the fifth season as Colonel Jack O'Neill in the big hit series Stargate SG-1, and I'm very pleased he's come back.

[To Richard] Stop reading the prompter.

This is Richard Whatever-His-Name-Is.

Richard Dean Anderson:
[Laughing] This is a ritual. I read it the last time. I just looked at the tape.

Vicki Gabereau:
I know, I know, I know, I know, it's a ritual now. So, how's it going? Five years. Holy Dinah.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Five long years, yeah. I'm tired, I will admit. I'm an old guy who's just a working stiff now. We just finished up our fifth season, weíve got one, at least one, more year to go. We'll be back in February to start shooting our sixth year. But in the meantime I have some other things to do.

Vicki Gabereau:
But a year ago when you were here and we had this same conversation, only the numbers had changed, four, it was four years, finishing four, going to do five, right?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah.

Vicki Gabereau:
And you didnít envision it going on forever. It now seems to be a life sentence, and, will it ever end?

Richard Dean Anderson:
It just seems like forever, yeah. You know what, it started out as a two-year commitment. I made a two-year commitment to Showtime and MGM for this Stargate franchise, what turned into a franchise. And just, it became successful immediately, we got picked up for two more years, weíre into four, then the fifth year became obvious, and the sixth year was sort of, is now becoming an addendum, more than anything. So weíre kind of trying to come full circle.

Vicki Gabereau:
How many months a year must you devote to this?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Nine. About nine months.

Vicki Gabereau:
That's a lot.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, it gets a little rough. It gets particularly rough for me because I have a 3-year-old daughter who lives in California, and I make the commute every Friday evening, Friday night, late flight, and come back on Sunday afternoons.

Vicki Gabereau:
Why can't they come here?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Uh, partially because...

Vicki Gabereau:
You want to go home.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Well, no, not so much, 'cause I love it here, I really love it here. But Wylie has started in... We finally got her into a school in which she will be about for about the next six years, and there was a waiting list, anyway, itís...

Vicki Gabereau:
Wylie? Her name is Wylie?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, Wylie.

Vicki Gabereau:
As in Wiley Post?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Wylie Quinn. Well, Wiley Post was one of the references we had to use, yeah. Eleanor Wiley was an English poet, as well.

Vicki Gabereau:
Oh, thatís right, yeah. So, that's how you came to name her that. There're not too many girls named Wylie.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Well, actually, I...

Vicki Gabereau:
Wile E. Coyote? Did that come up?

Richard Dean Anderson:
[Smiling] No!

Vicki Gabereau:
Never crossed your mind.

Richard Dean Anderson:
[Still smiling] You know what? Somehow, that never really kind of cropped up. I actually was reading a fairy tale one time, in utero, had the phone on the stomach...

Vicki Gabereau:
God, you're such a modern guy.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Well, I did! I was reading this fairy tale and the name Wylie cropped up and I said, "Let's put that on the list," and it made the cut. Wylie Quinn Annarose.

Vicki Gabereau:
Very nice name, isnít it?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, it goes on a bit but... [Laughing]

Vicki Gabereau:
Well, she's not likely to say it. And she'll hate you for something, sheíll say, "Why did you have to name me that for?"

Richard Dean Anderson:
[To the audience] Is this true? Do you folks know her well enough?

Vicki Gabereau:
Yes. They donít know, they donít know. Yeah, but she lives in England, mercifully, so she doesnít have to endure this. [RDA laughs] But she would absolutely kill me if I mentioned this. And now Iím so embarrassed.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Weíll be sending a tape.

Vicki Gabereau:
On the set are you feeling more and more like this has become a huge family?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, oh yeah.

Vicki Gabereau:
I mean, you know everybody, nobody changes much on this show.

Richard Dean Anderson:
You mean the characters, or the people working, the real workers?

Vicki Gabereau:
The real workers.

Richard Dean Anderson:
That element of it, the people who do the real work behind the scenes are...It does become familial, it really does. There's a little bit of an attrition rate in the early goings, because it's a rough gig. These people that I work with are up at 3:30, 4:00 in the morning prepping everything, getting everything... I mean, the behind the scenes folks, are really, they're the workers. Theyíre the people that I champion at any turn. If they can make the cut, basically, both physically, and take care of things, and mentally it does draw us all much closer. So we have a really great group up here, and they're all local people.

Vicki Gabereau:
Yeah. Do you have a piece of this show?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Meaning...? Do I have an emotional investment in it, or do I make money off of it?

Richard Dean Anderson:
And I also help perpetuate or help nurture it along, by, I guess basically by my presence, let alone any creative input I might have. We have, Brad Wright is... Well, he was here last time with us...

Richard Dean Anderson:
No, I donít have... What I do is take what is written, and...

Vicki Gabereau:
...and make it live.

Richard Dean Anderson:
...and what is known as "re-write," for which I've been raked over the coals. I mean, poor Brad, and the other writing staff, because they do write wonderfully, wonderful stories and part of the problem is in finding the voices to all the characters, 'cause thereís a myriad of characters that have to be serviced, and sometimes in telling a story you'll lose the voice of the character. So a lot of us are...

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, for the most part itís cosmetic altering of what is presented to you and it's tweaking more than anything. But if I were a writer, of any kind at all, and I presented a script and I did what I do to a script...

Vicki Gabereau:
You'd kill someone...

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, I'd be offended. And I think to some degree I should publicly say, [turning to the camera and grinning] "Thanks for enduring the..."

Vicki Gabereau:
...the abuse.

Richard Dean Anderson:
...the abuse, yes.

Vicki Gabereau:
Oh, you're such a nice guy. Okay, well do you want to watch a clip of, I think itís you and Tom McCann, actually?

Vicki Gabereau:
Oh, God, when is that day going to arrive, do you think?

Richard Dean Anderson:
I think after next season.

Vicki Gabereau:
You'll retire??

Richard Dean Anderson:
I'm not going to officially say this on... Although I will come back if I officially announce it.

Vicki Gabereau:
Thank you so much.

Richard Dean Anderson:
I'm making a transition out of the commercial end of television, and this next year, this next season of Stargate will probably be the swan song, at least to series television. I have this other group that Iím a part of now, a documentary film group and weíre making, essentially compiling a library of footage that deals with the great rivers of the world. We have about eight on our calendar now, and essentially they're all class 5 white water rivers.

Vicki Gabereau:
One would be the Fraser?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Not yet, no, we havenít gotten there yet.

Vicki Gabereau:
But you will.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Well, we've been to British Columbia, and we did a piece with the Klahoose Nation, I think I may have mentioned last time. Iíve since been to Chile, Iím going back there in March. I just got back from Tibet about a month ago. We ran the Yangtze, the Upper Yangtze, and did a cultural piece on Tibetan Buddhism and the cultures there, or the culture there.

Vicki Gabereau:
If you would like to just rest at that point, then we will sell soap...

Richard Dean Anderson:
Okay!

Vicki Gabereau:
And then you can come back and talk about river rafting on the Yangtze. Some people have a very nice life, don't they just, though?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Very cushy.

Vicki Gabereau:Very cushy. Richard Dean Anderson.

[They go to a commercial break, and return to a clip from an upcoming episode of Stargate in which OíNeill confronts Maybourne about whether he was the one who shot him in Desperate Measures. The clip ends with OíNeill demanding, "What do you know?!"]

Vicki Gabereau:
Not much, apparently! I speak for myself, because that was Tom McBeath, Tom McBeath, Tom McBeath, in a scene from Stargate SG-1, with some other guy who is the guest today. So, whereíd you get that necklace?

Richard Dean Anderson:
This? [Touching the necklace of beads visible at his throat] This is actually from Tibet. I mentioned I ran the Yangtze recently, I got back about six weeks ago or so, I lost track of time. But these are all... I collected these separate pieces, stones, they're all representative, obviously symbolic of certain things, and there's a coral and an amber in there, and the money. But I started... We ran what is known as the Upper Yangtze, and it starts...

Vicki Gabereau:
"Ran," you mean like on a raft?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Raft, yeah. To finance our trips we take clients along. Earth River Expeditions is the name of the company that Iím partnered with, Eric Hertz, and weíll take clients along. There was actually a group this time of women, it was like twenty women we brought.

Vicki Gabereau:
And then you shoot while you go?

Richard Dean Anderson:
We shoot, "Run and Gun," as we call it, and then what we do is get to our take-out, which happened to be in Yushu, and it's about a 520-mile run of the river.

Vicki Gabereau:
Wow.

Richard Dean Anderson:
We bus them back across the plateau, another 3-day trek across, back to Xining, and then they go on to Beijing. But we go back to the put-in, and run the river again on our own and do all our filming at the monasteries and the various towns along the way. Very few towns, mostly monasteries. Anyway, [indicating the beads on his necklace] these are all, were gifts made by some people and a couple of monks along the way.

Vicki Gabereau:
Did you have any trouble getting into Tibet?

Richard Dean Anderson:
No. It's an interesting... and I'm not quite sure how much I should talk about it because I became acutely aware of the political "tension," for lack of a better word, in regards to the Chinese and the Tibetan, you know, duplicity, whatever, I mean, it's a little touchy. In fact...

Vicki Gabereau:
Itís very touchy.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Well for instance, I couldn't say in applying for a visa that I was going to Tibet, I had to say I was going to China. So, it's something as simple as that...

Vicki Gabereau:
And then in China you applied within?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah, well what we did, was hire, and what one can do apparently, is hire, in fact, itís required, the Chinese government requires that you bring a member of the Travel Bureau along with you on your trip, because we went deep in, to, almost to the source of the Yangtze which is a 3-day, 3 and a half-day torturous trek across the plateau to gain altitude. So they come along with you just to make... just kind of to keep an eye on what you're doing.

Vicki Gabereau:
And youíre taking pictures all the time, 'cause you're now a fanatic picture taker.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Well, yeah, I mean...

[One of RDA's own photographs is shown, a black and white shot of an elderly Tibetan woman.]

Vicki Gabereau:
Look. Whoís that person? Do you know, do you remember?

Richard Dean Anderson:
This is a woman at one of the monasteries we visited, or one of the towns connected to the monastery, and she was, what you see in the right of the screen is a mani stone, and she was sitting there very arduously carving these very minute letterings and figures on these pieces of granite and stone. And that's basically what she does.

[A second photograph is shown, a black and white picture of a monastery.]

Vicki Gabereau:
What kind of camera did you use, because theyíre square prints? Is that like a Rolleiflex?

Richard Dean Anderson:
No, this is actually, itís a twelve dollar... Iíve been experimenting with different things, and this is a Holga 120.

Vicki Gabereau:
Oh, yeah.

Richard Dean Anderson:
And it's basically a throw-away.

[RDA turns to comment on the picture of the monastery, but the angle now shows a two-shot of RDA and Vicki, with the black and white photo in the background.]

Richard Dean Anderson:
That's a monastery, actually the monastery.

Vicki Gabereau:
That's us. This is us now.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Oh, right. I didn't take this picture. It's... the two of us.

Vicki Gabereau:
No. But we're a lovely couple, don't you think?

Richard Dean Anderson:
[Grinning] Yes.

Vicki Gabereau:
So, do you take a lot of cameras with you?

Richard Dean Anderson:
I did this time, and I learned a valuable lesson about... Because the people that I'm working with are professional photographers and videographers, and I'm not, but I want to be. You know, I'm a wannabe, one of those guys. So I've been taking... When Wylie was born, I used that as my springboard into learning the craft. I took thousands...

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yes, they are. But she gave me the excuse to really focus in on it. So, when I went, when I start going on the rivers now, I know how to pack much better, Pelicases and such. But I'm experimenting with a variety of different types of cameras. But the Holga, the ones that I was taking with that square format, is just a twelve dollar, basically a throw-away, that leaks light.

Vicki Gabereau:
Yeah, you could see, yeah...

Richard Dean Anderson:
I brought a packet that your folks filtered through and I'm sure they were, you know, "Those are terrible," 'cause they leak. I love that! Thatís an element that...

Vicki Gabereau:
You like it that it says, "Kodak" all across them?

Richard Dean Anderson:
Yeah. Thereís some really fascinating... Part of the, I mean, all the technology thatís available now, photographically, the technology is, makes things so... can, you can make things so clean and beautiful. Part of the joy of the Holga, and this isnít an ad for Holga, by the way...

Vicki Gabereau:
Apparently...

Richard Dean Anderson:
But, I like, when I take things down to [turning to the camera and grinning] Gamma Pro Imaging [laughter at his continued name-dropping] and I get my stuff...

Richard Dean Anderson:
Right. So what you end up doing is, or what I do, is load up about three of them, and throw them in a bag, when youíre done with them, download them later. [Grinning] "Download them." You kind of unroll them, is what you do. But thatís what thatís all... Anyway, that shot, that particular shot was taken in very dark, obviously, in a doorway of a monastery. And there was enough light there. Thereís no mirrors or anything in this camera, so you have to just click it. I held it open, and just guessed, to see if I got enough light on their faces.

Vicki Gabereau:
Well it really worked.

Richard Dean Anderson:
I got lucky.

Vicki Gabereau:
Okay, whatís going on in Chile? Because we donít have forever here, youíve got things to do.

Vicki Gabereau:
No, but whatís happening in Chile? I havenít been there. Is it great?

Richard Dean Anderson:
It is. When I go down... Iím going back in March to finish up the initial filming we did on the documentary piece, to the Futaleufu, Rio Futaleufu, which is a river that is possibly going to be compromised by a series of dams. Now, the pieces that weíre doing are not hardcore political, "white guys on the river saying how dare you build a dam" to the big corporations.

Vicki Gabereau:
Good.

Richard Dean Anderson:
What weíre trying to do is show the joy, the glory, the beauty, and if the people of the valley, this particular valley, the Futaleufu, which is Chilean Patagonia, if they happen to mention that "Did you know thereís a dam coming up?" then by all means, "How do you feel about that?" We had a hundred year old guy, which was one of the more poignant moments that weíve had down there, a hundred year old man say to us, on camera, "It would be a sad day in my life if I had to build a boat to live in my home." Which speaks volumes, rather than going up to Endessa and saying, "Whenís enough enough?" Itís all about hydroelectric. The BiobŪo was dammed and now itís a big stagnant lake that provides a lot of electricity for Argentina, Chile, and these other places. Weíre trying not to be too political about them because the joy that we garner from it is the joy of the rivers themselves, and the venues in which they lay. So, thatís what Chileís all about.

Vicki Gabereau:
[Concluding the interview] Bye.

Richard Dean Anderson:
And weíll be to Alaska and Canada, and weíll get back...

Vicki Gabereau:
You could just stay here and blither on for the whole hour, couldnít you?

Richard Dean Anderson:
I could! [Grinning] And I havenít had my Starbucks yet. [Laughing at one more example of name-dropping]

Vicki Gabereau:
See, another commercial.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Actually I have, but itís decaf.

Vicki Gabereau:
Itís really, itís almost embarrassing to be with you.

Richard Dean Anderson:
You donít have to pay for anything if you keep name-dropping. [Both laughing]

Vicki Gabereau:
Thank you, dear.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Bless you.

Vicki Gabereau:
See you again, soon, I hope.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Iím kissing you. [He leans over to give her a kiss on the cheek.] Thanks.

Vicki Gabereau:
Ah, Richard Dean Anderson. You can see him on Stargate SG-1. I know what that showís called. Really, really I do.

Richard Dean Anderson:
Youíre supposed to sell me!

Vicki Gabereau:
Oh, yeah yeah yeah...

[Applause as they go to a commercial]

[The final segment of the show was with Lorna Suzuki, the Education Director for the Greater Vancouver Zoo, who had brought some discarded and abandoned exotic pets, now in the care of the zoo. RDA stayed for the first animal, a blind cheetah, who was introduced as "in the company of Richard Dean Anderson, who is the guy who wouldn't leave." Throughout the segment, RDA petted the cheetah and whispered gently to it as the cheetah licked his hand and purred loudly.]